HHHHBHHI 

H 

v 



m 



<■■■■•■ •*< 

HHBBS 




f£MB 









~> > 




> 


> 


> 


) 


J 


, 0) 


>>' ^5/ 






) > 


-, > -» s> ' 
J > > 




.' 


3 ' 




) 


j, 


.1 > 


■■> s> 






> ~> 


> 










> > ■ 




~> _> 


• 


>J» 




J> > 








> > 


' 



> u> 

> 1> 

> > 



> > 

3> > 



> >> 












LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



r>Z> 



Z> 



i «ii^^^ < ik^^ < ^£ < *> , «>'%' < 3s> < 3fc' < «> < * f ' 



"5 » 
> ^ » 



» 


.-> 


"TX> 




C>> 


^> 


s> 


-> 


~S> 


.-> 


X> 


I> 






2> > 

^> > 

:> > 



» 






5JB» 


» ■> 


':»?-«> 


~. ~> 


~^m> 


z> ) 


3»3> 


2> ^ 


m> 


■$> "> 


.. ^s» 


2> ~> 


^> 


> > 




> "> 


>5> 


> 3> 




> > 


, i 7 P 


S> ~> 


> :» 


> 3 


> > 


> > 


> > 


;> :> 


> :> 


> 




* ' 


7> S> 




£> > 




v> z> 





r> > 




z> 




> • 



:-> >> 



> > > 



7> > >:> 



■ >> 

., 






:> > 



3 o 2 


> 


:> >■>; 


~> 


O > > 


• 3 


3 > > 


1 D 



~> -.:> 



e»> 




-> > 

3 > 


t^> 




9tt> 


:> > 




;;z> 


■ > 


> > 


I*. > 


-v 




^> 


-> 




gs> 


> > 

-> :> 

^> 

> ~> 

> t> 

> :> 

> :> 


::» 

z>> 


_J* 




> 
> 


z* 
3> 




> 


:> 

^ 
3 






— :> ~> • 



2> V ? > 



~5 >' ~> 

> > ~z^ 

-> 3 .I 



— 






> 


> j^*> -> 


:^ 


) :>:> T) 


> • 


5 3>> 3 


» 


? > 36> jr> r 




^-> r^ ^ 




> ^» > : 






■) > 


">3> > 


:> >> 


> J) 


^» > 


':> 


> ~> 


^►> y 




3 "> 


» > 


> ,. 


> > 


>5 ^> 


> g 


> 


» > : 


• 



:0 












All About 
Ferrets and Rats 



BY 



"SURE POP." 



ALL ABOUT FERRETS AND RATS' 



A COMPLETE HISTORY OF 



.. u. 



EfflS, MS, # HAT EXTERMINATION 



PERSONAL EXPERIENCES AND STUDY. 



— ALSO — 



A PRACTICAL HAND-BOOK ON THE FERRET. 



V^ 



By "SUR^ F»OFV' 

(Adolph Isaacsen.) 






I 



PRICK, IFIZFTKIElNr CE33STTS. 



NEW YORK: 

Adolph Isaacsen, Publisher, 

No. 93 Fulton Street. 







Imi, cnrding to act of Congress, inthe-yeai 1886. 

A.DOLPH ESAACSEN, 
in the Office ■>* the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



COnSTTElSTTS: 



Page. 

Introductory 6 

The Ferret. 

I. What a Ferret Is 7 

II. Character and Appearance 9 

III. Eat Hunting 11 

IV. Food 14 

V. Ferret Pens 15 

VI. Diseases 1C 

VII. Hardiness 17 

VIII. Breeding and Training 19 

IX. Strength and Bite 20 

X. Handling 21 

XI. With Cats and Dogs 21 

XII. Advantages as a Eat Exterminator 22 

XIII. Miscellaneous 23 

The Eat. 

I. The Eat Family and its Varieties 27 

II. Eat History 27 

III. The King's O wn Eat-Catcher 29 

IV. Eat Society, Cannihalism, and Friendship 30 

V. Multiplying Powers 33 

VI. Unabridged Bill of Fare 34 

VII. Ferocity 35 

VIIL Eats in Breweries, Slaughter Houses, Markets, 

Stahles, and Barn-yards 36 

IX. Eats as Wine Drinkers 33 

X. Destructiveness 39 

XI. EatsasFood 40 

XII. EatNests 43 

XIII. The Eat's Musical Talents and Eyesight 45 

XVI. Eats as Moralists 46 

XV. Eats in the Good Old Days, and the Modem Eat 

Superstitions 47 

XVI. Eevicw of the Eat, and Conclusion 49 

Eat Extermination. 

I. Traps 51 

II. Poisons ., 54 

III. Dogs, Cata, and Ferrets 55 

The Origin of the Ferret, with Hints to Darwin 57 



INTRODUCTORY. 



In the following pages we have given a complete 
review of the ever-important rat exterminating sub- 
ject, from a practical man's point of view. The essay 
on the Ferret has been exhaustively treated, is a 
special feature of the work, and will be found of great 
value to the rat-ridden part of the community, as well 
as to the fancier and naturalist. u The Hat " has been 
handled from a universal point of view, and the book 
has been prepared from the writer's practical notes 
during his thirty years' study of Eats and Hat Exter- 
mination. 



THE FERRET. 



I. — WHAT A FERRET IS. 

Our dictionaries say that " ferret " as a verb active 
means to search ont carefully. This is certainly an 
important function of the animal, but, as it belongs to 
the Musteline or flesh -eating weasel family, it has aleo 
inherited these animals' boldness and savageness, though 
tempered and exercised in a very useful direction, i. e., 
of killing ofE the most bothersome and numerous of 
our vermin for us. It is rather a well-known family, 



8 

the one to which the ferret belongs, including such 
animals as the sable, which furnishes the highly-prized 
fur, the skunk, with its not as greatly valued perfume, 
the ermine, the color of which is likened to the driven 
snow and whose dress forms the badge of royalty, the 
weasel, from which artists obtain their finest brushes, 
the marten, the badger, and the otter. The shape of 
these animals, the characteristics being strongly marked 
in the ferret, is long, slender, and serpentine (snake- 
like and winding), their teeth are very sha^p, the muzzle 
and legs short. Their average food is rats, rabbits, 
and birds. Members of this class are found in all cli- 
mates and parts of the earth. 

It is necessary to state, primarily, that there is no 
such thing as a wild ferret ; it is domesticated in the same 
degree as a cat or a dog. The wild animal from which 
the ferret is bred is the weasel, just as the dog is origi- 
nally of wolf extraction, and the cat of the same class as 
the tiger or lion. The ferret is also interbred with the 
different species of the musteline tribe, such as the 
mink, marten, polecat, and fitch. These are neverthe- 
less all weasels in the same way that terriers, black and 
tans, Newfoundlands, and poodles all belong to the 
family of dogs. The ferret's origin has been traced 
by some to Spain, by others again to the northwestern 
part of Africa, and by still different writers as far away 
from us as Egypt, but it was first used authentically for 
ratting and rabbiting in Great Britain, where it is most 

DO ' 

highly prized, its merits understood, and where almost 
every one is as familiar with it as he is with the nature 
of his house cat. The public here in America is yet 
but indifferently acquainted with the ferret. At an 
exhibition of ferrets made by the writer at Madison 



9 

Square Garden there was about one out of ever y fifteen 
persons that knew the name of the animal at all, and 
the ferrets were alternately designated as skunks, weas- 
els, guinea-pigs, raccoons, monkeys, woodchucks, kit- 
tens, puppies, squirrels, rabbits, chipmunks, rats (an 
animal for which they are commonly mistaken), hares, 
martens, otters, small kangaroos, muskrats, beavers, 
seals, and, ridiculous as it may seem, small bears. The 
American race of ferrets has been bred to a high de- 
gree of intelligence, as the proper medium of wildness 
in the hunt and docility to its keeper has been obtained 
principally through the efforts of the present writer. 
This, however, has only been brought about after a 
great deal of close study and experiment in cross breed- 
ing, until now the American animal is greatly prefer- 
able to its more sluggish and vicious English brother. 

II. — CHARACTER AND APPEARANCE. 

Every individual ferret has a character and distinct 
look of its own, although there are some ugly, scarred, 
and bony specimens with game legs and glass eyes, 
still the ferret, when in good condition, is a pretty 
little animal, with soft fur and kittenish ways, and can 
be bandied and fondled after you have become mutually 
acquainted, the same as a cat. It can never be made 
as trustworthy as a dog, because it does not possess as 
much intelligence. The general colors are white, yel- 
low, and a mixture of black, brown, gray, and tan, 
varied with gray and white patches over and under 
the neck and body. The tint runs according to the 
predominance of either mink, marten, fitch, or polecat 
blood. The ferret is essentially a useful animal, and 



10 

is not valued for its good looks, but the purely colored, 
pink-eyed, white ferret, with its plump form and beau- 
tiful, glossy coat of a creamy shade, does certainly not 
present an ungainly appearance. The dark ones are a 
sprightly company, too, with their friendly, sparkling 
black eyes and social nature. There is no standard 
size — there are large and small breeds, the age having 
nothing to do with its inches. Some ferrets never get 
to be bigger than a size beyond a dock rat, while I 
have had others as large as a full grown cat. There are 
ferrets more valuable as hunters than others on account 
of their wiry forms, their age, experience, and intelli- 
gence. I have small, homely ferrets, which persons 
not understanding ferret peculiarities would pick out 
as the most miserable and stupid of a lot, but which in 
reality are choice hunting stock. There is no prefer- 
ence for small or large ferrets, as they are both good 
for different purposes. Ferrets are cleanly animals 
both in appearance and in their habits. Their jump- 
ing and climbing powers are limited. There is a 
curious thing about the ferret that reminds us of its 
kinsmanship with the gentle-tempered skunk, for 
when it is teased or aggravated (showing this also by 
bristling up the hair of its tail) it emits a pungent 
odor from a gland it has underneath the tail. This 
only happens in extreme cases, otherwise it is peaceful 
enough except toward its natural prey. Different lots 
of * ferrets, strangers to each other, will not agree, and 
should not he put together, as there is & risk of a 
deadly oattle. It is a pleasant enough thing to watch 
a number of healthy ferrets at their antics. On the 
writer's breeding grounds, where the pens are always 
kept neatly painted and the sawdust carefully leveled 



11 

on the floor, making it look like a lawn in yellow, the y 
generally huddle tip in a snug heap, presenting a con- 
fused jumble of heads, tails, blinking eyes, and indis- 
tinguishable masses of fur. This is during the day- 
time, after they have been fed. Toward dusk, or 
when they are hungry again, they disentangle them- 
selves from the bunch, one by one, and after they have 
properly yawned and stretched themselves they are 
very lively. They frisk and gambol about like lambs 
in a pasture, without the odd, long-legged appearance 
of the lamb, but they make up for this by humping 
up their backs like small dromedaries. They get to 
tumbling over one another in a comic, clown-like way, 
they run, galop, trot, and hop, and sit erect on their 
haunches. This latter action they perform in expec- 
tation of a mouse, a special delicacy with them, though 
but a mouthful, from the keepers leaning over the 
pens above. Upon the whole they seem to be enjoy- 
ing life immensely, presenting quite a study of animal 
contentment and happiness. 

HI. EAT HUNTING. 

When the word rat is mentioned in connection 
with the ferret, our pacific scene is changed to 
one of war and bloodshed. The savage instincts 
of the animal are then aroused, and the rat itself 
knows, when it has caught the ferret's scent, that 
its time has come. There are no two animals more 
deadly enemies than these, the ferret being con- 
structed in such a way that it is best adapted to hunt 
the rat in the rat's own haunts. Wherever a rat can 
go a ferret can go, because the latter's body is as 



12 

flexible as rubber, and it can squeeze itself up, draw 
itself out, and flatten its limbs into a likeness of a New 
England buckwheat cake, as if there wasn't a bone in 
its body. The weasels, and nearly all wild animals of 
this division, after killing the prey suck the blood, eat 
the brain, leave the rest of the body untouched, and 
then proceed to annihilate the next victim, repeating 
the operation. Here is where the difference between 
the ferret and the other animals of its tribe comes in, 
for it does not content itself with brain food and such 
ethereal substances, but devours the whole carcass 
with a fine relish, not even leaving the tail or the 
skin. It bolts the bones and everything else thereto 
appertaining. It is rather an appalling experience for 
the first time to hear the hungry ferret's teeth go 
crunch, crunch, as they meet in the neck of some fat 
rodent. This sound bears a resemblance to a cowboy 
chewing radishes. A very hungry ferret would com- 
mence to devour the rat before it had thoroughly 
made its exit into the sweet subsequently. In using 
ferrets to clear a house of rats, they should be al- 
lowed to nose through the building during the night 
with the same freedom accorded a domestic animal. 
During the day they are kept in the pen. The reason 
a ferret should be hunted with in the night is that it 
sees better then, and that it is instinctively better 
fitted for hunting. The rats also become more vent- 
uresome at this time. When the ferrets are to be 
hunted with, feed them slightly, as feeding blunts 
their hunting capabilities and makes them worthless. 
After a good feed a ferret will sleep harder than any 
other domestic animal. Sometimes you will find a ferret 
so hard asleep that you can take him up, shake him, 



13 

and then pnt him down again without waking him. 
If you are inexperienced in the ways of the ferret, you 
will imagine you have a corpse on your hands. But 
the corpse will in a short time open its eyes, shake 
itself, wag its tail, and then trot around with the 
others. AVhen a ferret sleeps he will let his com- 
panions tramp all over his head and body without 
allowing himself to be disturbed in the least. When 
they have been fed too well they will sleep and be of 
no further use. If these over-fed ferrets are in a pen 
and you put rats in for them to kill, they will not 
wake up even if the rats crawl all over them, although 
the rodents are scared into fits and are trying to get 
away with all their might and main. A hungry ferret 
around a house will go scenting around as hunting 
dogs do, to discover any trace or hiding-place of his 
natural prey. This in itself is enough to drive all the 
rats to Jericho and make them stay there as long as 
the ferrets are kept around, for the rodents have an 
acute bodily fear of these prowling detectives. A 
ferret's being bitten by a rat happens only in extreme 
cases, but sometimes in cellars and other places that 
are swarming with rats, ferrets that have first been 
put in have to contend with great odds, and come out 
with some bruises. Therefore if even a good, old 
hunting ferret should be bitten by a rat, he should not 
be used until the wound is perfectly healed again, 
even if it should take two or three weeks. The ferret 
is very peculiar in this respect, and if this rule is 
not observed he may be spoiled as a hunter forever 
afterwards. The ferrets hunt downward, and if put 
on the upper or top floors in the evening they w T ill 
turn up in the morning down in the cellar driving the 



14 

rats before them. They should be kept in a dry- 
place, and they rapidly get to know their pens, return- 
ing to them and waiting to be put in when through 
hunting. With a moderate amount of attention they 
will thrive and prosper in their work of extermination. 



iv. — food. 

Ferrets should always be anxious for their meals. 
Rats are good ferret food, but it is never advisable to 
feed dead rats, as there is always the risk of the rats 
having been previously poisoned, this also transmit- 
ting itself to the ferrets. If there are plenty of rats in 
the place the ferret will be able to do his own choice 
marketing, otherwise he can be fed on small quantities 
of raw meat, liver excepted, but salt meat should 
never be given him. Ferrets will also eat bread and 
milk and the other food given the domestic cat, to- 
gether with an allowance of water. Particular relishes 
of theirs are chicken heads, rabbit heads, sparrows, and 
similar small birds. The ferrets' enjoyment of their 
meals is to say the least demonstrative, as they give 
vent to a great many grunts and snarls of satisfaction, 
together with great smacking of lips. This is par- 
ticularly the case when feasting off a rat, as there is 
nothing they enjoy more than a good, big, healthy 
rodent, turning the latter inside out, and ploughing 
out its interior with great exactness. When it is not 
desired to hunt with the ferrets, feed morning and 
evening; when hunting, feed slightly in morning 
only. 



15 



V. — FERKET PENS. 



Ferrets must have plenty of good air, as they can 
not stand confinement without getting diseased, and 
should therefore never be kept in small cages for any 
length of time. Yarious breeders have difiternt ways 
of keeping them, but the writer, after having tried a 
large number of cages of all kinds, has found that a 
common wooden pen answers the purpose the best. If 
ferrets are kept in a building, a pen can be built in a dry 
cellar. A dry goods box with the top off will do, dimen- 
sions to be about 3 feet wide, 3 feet deep, and 3 feet 
long, the bottom filled in with sand, earth, or sawdust, 
and if the latter, it should be cleaned out once a day. 
This is for one pair of ferrets. If you can keep them 
in the open air, do so by all means ; it is greatly pref- 
erable. American bred ferrets will stand the climate 
and thrive in out-of-door pens, but imported English 
stock will not ; in fact, they can never get used to the 
climate at all. For a pen in the open air which can be 
used as a breeding pen, too, I recommend the follow- 
ing structure, this being used by myself for keeping 
ferrets in small numbers : 

A compact, solidly built box with a slanting roof or 
top, dimensions to be 6 feet long, 4 feet high, and 4 
feet wide. It has a wire front and two divisions, 
there being access from one to the other by a small 
sliding door. The smaller division is 2, the other 
4 feet long. The smaller part is kept chock full 
of hay in winter, in summer half full, and it has 
also a door over the wire. This is the ferrets' 
sleeping apartment, in which they are warm in the 
coldest of weather. It can also be used as a breeding 



16 

pen for the female, because when the door over the 
wire is closed it is perfectly dark, darkness being 
absolutely necessary for this purpose. In the larger 
apartment the ferrets can come out for fresh air, can 
exercise themselves, get their food, and perform their 
necessary duties, for which latter they use only one 
particular corner of the pen. At the back of the pen 
there are two large doors so that you can get at the 
ferrets at any time. Hay is a great promoter of clean- 
liness, changing it once every two or three months 
during the winter being sufficient. A pen like the 
above will do for one pair of breeders, but you can keep 
four pair of ferrets in it. In the summer the two rear 
wooden doors of the pen may be replaced with wire 
ones, the ferrets can also be taken out and exercised in 
the open air under your supervision. 

VI. — DISEASES. 

On the topic of ferret diseases, all the advice I can 
give is of a preventive, rather than of a curative, 
nature. My experience has been that, when a ferret 
is sick, it is the wisest policy to kill it immediately, as 
in all my practice I have never cured a sick ferret yet. 
Of course there are numerous remedies advocated 
by persons who claim to " know it all " ; but experi- 
ment with these is simply a waste of time and ma- 
terial. The common diseases of ferrets are foot-rot, 
distemper, diphtheria, and influenza. Foot-rot is 
caused by dirt and neglect, and is the most common, 
dangerous, and devastating. It makes the feet swell 
out to twice their natural size, and become spongy ; the 
nose and snout get dirty; the eyes commence to run, 



17 

become perceptibly weaker, and then close. The 
tail also changes to a sandy and gravelly textnre. 
Distemper is only a case of foot-rot aggravated. In 
influenza the nose runs violently, and there is the 
same affection of the eyes, accompanied by incessant 
sneezing. Diphtheria is a throat trouble, indicated 
by swelling of the neck, much heavy coughing, and 
nearly the same other accompaniments as the above 
diseases. To prevent disease, cleanliness and modera- 
tion are the simple antidotes : this is not such a hard 
thing to accomplish, as the ferret is a strong animal 
for its size, and very cleanly itself. Ferrets are some- 
times run down by overwork in hunting, and get 
to be dull and sluggish ; but they will soon regain 
their vigor, by letting them rest for awhile, and 
giving them plenty of food. Pure air, fresh, raw, 
bloody meat, and good milk, will soon bring the 
ferrets back to their natural state inside of a week. 

Ferrets are sometimes troubled with fleas of a large 
size, that use the animals up greafly if they are not 
checked immediately. A little Sure Pop Insect 
Powder rubbed in dry with the hand will settle the 
insects effectively in a very short time. 

VII. HAKDINESS. 

There are numerous remarkable examples of ferret 
toughness on record. ISTot long since, the following 
came under my notice : A couple of ferrets were used 
in a warehouse, and one of them, a handsome, dark- 
coated, mink-bred animal, accidently fell through a 
hatchway from the fourth story. He was brought 
to me in a horrible condition, the hinder part of the 



18 

body being entirely smashed out of shape, and com- 
pletely paralyzed. The poor brute was forced to 
drag along its useless trunk with the help of its fore- 
feet only. I thought myself the animal was assuredly 
done for; but in a fortnight it had quite recovered 
the use of its limbs, which also assumed their natural 
form and function. It was again enabled to hop 
about as well as the rest ; in fact, no trace of its 
former complete demolition remained. Another note- 
worthy example was this : A friend of mine, M 

was out rabbit-hunting with a companion carrying his 
ferret, which had been muzzled, in his pocket, a com- 
mon way of transporting it. After he had bagged 
half a dozen rabbits in one place, he secured his ferret 
again, and went on walking some distance through 
a sno wed-over part of the woods, chatting with his 
friend. He suddenly felt in his pocket, and found 
his ferret had got aw T ay. They retraced their steps, 
carefully searching for two or three hours high and 

low, but without success. M went home, satisfied 

his ferret was lost. Eight days afterwards, coming 
over the same ground, he saw a shadowy, thin spot 
of dirty fur under a ridge, which, after he had more 
closely examined, turned out to be the long-lost ani- 
mal. It was completely exhausted and reduced to 
a skeleton, but still showed some signs of life. It 
had probably crawled in under some small opening 
in a ridge at the time of its being dropped, and so 

had escaped M 's attention. As he found his ferret 

with the muzzle still on, it could not have procured 
either food or drink. The poor brute must have 
suffered agonies, showing what horrible cruelty the 
practice of muzzling is. M took his ferret 



19 



home, fed it well, and inside of a month it was entirely 
restored, and just as good a ferret, in every respect, 
as ever. If ferrets are together, and are kept strictly 
without food for a length of time, they will devour 
one another quite readily, in lieu of better fodder. 



viii. — breeding and training. 

Ferrets are rather difficult animals to raise in num- 
bers — it requires a large amount of patience, great 
care, and scrupulous neatness, although when full 
grown they are very hardy. The writer's ferret 
breeding grounds consist of special farms, on which 
are erected numbers of small barn-like structures, 
each furnished inside with a dozen pens, and an aisle 
running through the middle. Every pen is as large 
as a horse's stall, the boarding and other accessories are 
kept clean by vigorous scrubbing, the sawdust on the 
floor is changed once a day, and the pens and the 
ferrets are otherwise attended by experienced ferret 
men. Here the ferrets are taught to do their work 
of killing and hunting by practical experiment on live 
rats. Although it is in the nature of ferrets to hunt 
and kill rats, the same as it is for a bird to fly, yet we 
find a little extra course of training is necessary in 
both cases. 

It will not do to hunt with ferrets until they are at 
least seven months old. Ferrets breed but once a 
year, and have from four to nine at a litter on the 
average — it is very rarely they have two litters a 
year. They are trained to the whistle by feeding 
them every time this instrument is used, so that after 



20 

awhile they promptly respond. The ferret is ruled 
through his stomach. The time of the ferret's getting 
in heat is in March, nine weeks after which they 
breed. The male invariably takes hold of the female 
as if he were going to strangle her. The young are 
born without hair, and must, therefore, be kept warm. 
They have their eyes open in ten days, and should be 
fed on as much milk as they want. * The male 
should be removed from the female before the litter- 
ing, the symptoms of which are exactl) like a cat or a 
dog, or else he will destroy the entire brood. Care 
should be taken to have the female well supplied with 
food during the period of copulation, or else she may 
casually munch up the young herself, and the writer 
has lost many a pretty litter by this little habit of the 
unnatural mother. As in crops, there are years for 
raising ferrets which are more fortunate than others, 
some seasons having a fatal effect on the young ones. 



IX. STRENGTH AND BITE. 

The great strength of the ferret is in the teeth, neck, 
and forefeet. One ferret can hold up eight times its 
own weight with its teeth. Twenty or thirty ferrets 
when hungry will fasten their teeth in a piece of meat 
and can be picked up in this way and swung around 
without ever causing them to think of letting go. 
They will hang to an object w r hich they have been 
provoked against with a persistence which would 
make a Bill Sykes bull-dog blush with shame. The 
only way to loosen their hold is to grasp them firmly 

* They ought not to be bandied before they are one month old. 



21 

around the neck with the pressure on the skull, and 
to shove them towards the object, not from it, for if 
you try the latter way you can pull for a day and a 
night without any perceptible result on the ferret. 

The bite of a ferret is not dangerous ; they will 
only bite a human being out of mistake, because they 
don't see well in the daytime. They imagine you are 
kindly holding down some bit of meat for them to 
chew at, and they don't bite because they are at all 
viciously inclined towards you. Of course you don't 
want to tease, annoy, or step on them, or you may find 
them loaded. If a ferret bites you, he will let go im- 
mediately, and you and the ferret both will quickly 
realize the mistake. 

X. — HANDLING. 

Ferrets should at first be handled by the back of the 
neck. The tail is the natural handle for lifting up a 
ferret, in the same degree that the ears are of a rabbit. 
The ferret should only be lifted by the tail and 
should be handled by the back of the neck. After a 
wild ferret has been handled this way for some time 
he will get to be very tame and you can handle him in 
any way. He will get so that he will hop up in his 
pen at your approach and want you to play with and 
caress him, although it is never advisable to give him 
your perfect confidence, such as putting him to your 
face, etc. 

XI. — WITH CATS AND DOGS. 

Ferrets are easily kept with cats and dogs, and after 
a little training and discipline they will hunt together, 
the ferret being generally used to drive out the rats 



22 

from the holes in a barn, etc., and the dog doing the 
killing. When they are first introduced to each other 
there will be a little sparring, and the dog's master 
must strictly forbid his dog to toicch the ferret or else 
the dog may kill it at the first wrestle, but after the 
novelty of each other's appearance has worn off they 
will lie down together in one corner and be the best of 
friends, as I have witnessed scores of times. The 
writer has cats and ferrets on his farm that regularly 
feed and play together. Ferrets should not be kept 
in a place with sick dogs or cats, as the disease will 
surely be transmitted to them. 

XII. THE FEKREt's ADVANTAGES AS A EAT EX- 
TERMINATOR. 

Ferrets have been brought forward, chiefly by the 
labors of the present writer, to be regarded within the 
last few years as domestic animals. There is cer- 
tainly, yet, a great degree of prejudice against the 
ferret — a natural result of ignorance of its ways ; 
but we firmly believe that the more it comes in con- 
tact with man, and is bred in captivity, the more 
readily it will be put by him in the division of com- 
mon domestic animals, and he will, furthermore, find 
it his best remedy in rat extermination, making the 
latter worthies as scarce as the ordinary rat has made 
its black-complexioned cousin. 

For this latter purpose the ferret's most apparent 
advantages are as follows : 

First. There is nothing a rat is more afraid of, by 
nature, than a ferret, so that the rats are driven off by 
acute bodily fear. 



23 

Second. The body of the ferret, and its small head 
also, is remarkably flexible, thus enabling it to get 
into and drive out the vermin from their holes and 
breeding-places. 

Third. When through hunting they do not stray 
off, but return to their pens, and wait there till they 
are put in. 

Fourth. They devour the entire carcass of the rat, 
after killing it, and do not leave the slightest trace of 
it around. 

Fifth. The ferrets can be trained to obey the 
whistle somewhat like a dog, and, by attaching a bell 
to their necks, they can always be traced to whatever 
part of the building they may stray. 

Sixth. After they get acquainted, and have been 
handled for some time, they become affectionate pets, 
and can be fondled and caressed freely. 

Seventh. They are very cleanly, peaceful, and non- 
destructive in other ways. 

XIII. MISCELLANEOUS. 

Ferrets are extensively used to drive out rabbits 
from their holes, although the laws are very stringent 
against this sport. For this purpose they are gener- 
ally muzzled, which is a cruel and unnecessary prac- 
tice. All that is required of the ferret is to drive 
and scare out — the rabbit being then caught or shot. 
A bell around the ferret's neck will scare off the rab- 
bit immediately, because the ferret is slow, and the 
rabbit will hear him coming from a distance. A 



24 

properly trained and handled ferret needs no harness 
of any kind. Never muzzle a ferret for rats, as he 
may be savagely attacked where the rats are thick, 
and then be unable to defend himself. Ferrets are 
muzzled by tying their jaws, so that they can not bite, 
with waxed cords, etc. There are also muzzles like 
those made for dogs, only fitted to the ferret's size. 

A writer in a certain £J ew York paper has put the fer- 
rets to a peculiar use, on account of their flexible bodies. 
The following is quoted from a supposititious interview 
with the present writer : " A gentleman purchased a 
ferret, and became greatly attached to it. To show 
me how well he had trained him since the purchase, 
he called Pet (as he had dubbed him) to his side, and, 
dropping his pencil behind a large immovable desk, 
where it would be almost impossible to get it again, he 
merely said, " Get it ! " In an instant the ferret was 
off, and soon back again with the pencil in his mouth. 
The gentleman said that he had been of great service 
to him in that way, and he recommended them to all 
old ladies who are in the habit of losing thimbles and 
spectacles in out-of-the-way nooks and holes." We 
can not help remarking, that this certainly imputes a 
trifle too much intelligence to the animal. 

There seems to be a curious superstition regarding 
the ferret amongst the lower classes of people from Eng- 
land, Ireland, and Scotland, to the effect that the fer- 
ret possesses healing properties. I have numbers of 
people come to me with pans of milk, part of which 
they want the ferrets to lap up, reserving the other 
half for medicine. They firmly believe this an infalli- 
ble cure for whooping-cough in children. On some 
days so many people come for this purpose, with milk 



25 

in all sorts of vessels, that the ferrets would certainly 
have burst their buttons, if they had any, in trj'ing to 
do justice to all of it. The people wait their turn 
patiently, and come any day I appoint to have the 
ferrets drink some of the milk. I have heard many 
miraculous accounts from them of Mrs. So-and-so's 
baby who was down " that sick " with the whoop- 
ing-cough, and the " doctors givin' her up, and she 
comin' to directly by a drop o' the milk the blessed 
little craythurs had been lappin' at; and it's the only 
rale rimedy yer can put intire faith in." 

The following is an extract from a Kansas news- 
paper : " An old Englishman is now traveling through 
the country with two pair of ferrets, with which he 
is making money by killing prairie-dogs. He has his 
pets in a wire cage, and, going to a ranch where there 
are indications of prairie-dogs, he offers to clean out 
the dog-town for 1 cent per dog. The price ap- 
pears so very small, that the ranchman does not hes- 
itate to accept the offer. One ferret will clean out 
from twenty to fifty dogs before he tires out, or, 
rather, before he gets so full of blood of his victims 
that he can't work well. When one is tired out, a 
fresh one is put into service ; and so on until the town 
is rid of dogs." 



THE RAT. 



I. THE EAT FAMILY AND ITS VARIETIES. 

The cynical, and, as lie is generally acknowledged, 
villainous old rat, is a near kinsman of as innocent and 
peaceful a community as the squirrels, rabbits, and 
hares are, at least the natural histories unite in telling 
ns that they all belong to the Rodentia or gnawing 
animal family. The three great subdivisions of rat 
are the Black, Brown and Water varieties. With the 
latter v r e have nothing to do, as it is an innocent field 
animal that never goes near man or his works, and is 
not properly one of the " whiskered vermin race " or 
rat breed. The dock rats belong to the Brown brigade. 

II. EAT HISTOEY. 

Regarding the rat's history and antecedents we are 
informed in some books on this subject, very positively, 
that the common or Brown rat was brought from Nor- 
way, while other naturalists insist w r ith a pertinacity 
peculiar to the tribe that the animal originally comes 
from Persia and India. We feel justified in believing 
with the majority that this kind of vermin has its 
origin in Asia, that venerable continent of cholera, 
Heathen-Chinee, and Old Testament. But again, what- 
soever the different opinions may be, it is certainly 
found that thia species of rodent is distributed over 
every country on the face of the earth in a very near 
equal way, because every ship that leaves port takes in 



28 

its cargo of rats just as regularly as it does its cargo of 
provisions and merchandise, and thus it can be readily 
seen how this delicate tender blossom is carefully 
though unwittingly transplanted. In this way the 
Brown rat, which is now the strongly predominant 
rat party, was brought to New York and America in 
1775 from England, which would doubtless give great 
pleasure to that part of the population with an Anglo- 
maniac tendency and would probably reconcile them 
much more to tl lis sect of vermi n . In Europe the latter 
made their appearance in 1730, and then spread out to 
every inhabitable country. " For men may come and 
men may go, but I go on forever " would at the first 
glance seem to be the case with the rat tribe as well 
as with the musical brooklet of Tennyson, yet the 
history of the rat nations is like unto the history of 
man — one clan waging a long and bitter war of con- 
quest and extermination against the other until hardly 
any trace of the conquered but once mighty and ambi- 
tious race remains. The Black or Indigenous rat had 
things all its own way in North America as well as 
through the rest of the civilized earth, before the Brown 
species' sweeping invasion, the former having been en- 
tirely subdued and are now very scarce. It was easy 
enough for the brown rats to do this, because they were 
bigger, bolder, and more ferocious. Their multiplying 
powers, too, were sixteen times greater than the van- 
quished nation whose origin is shrouded in the darkest 
and most complete mystery. 

The writer has on several occasions observed a dark 
colored rat on vessels coming from Brazil and other 
States of South and Central America that was unlike 
any specimen of this jinimal he had remembered ever 



29 

seeing before. It was of a deep bluish tint, had 
an. abnormally long tail, very large ears, and sharp, 
fiery, bead-like eyes, that looked in the dark like small 
electric lamps. Its agility and desperate nervousness 
was something marvelous, and its bump of destructive- 
ness was largely developed ako. This is probably a 
stray representative from some struggling colony of 
the dethroned black rat nation. Small numbers of them 
are occasionally brought to our own shores by these 
vessels. The rats generally escape from the ships, 
whereupon, as soon as the vessel is about to sail away 
again, their places are promptly filled by their brown 
brethren. Then the desolate black rats stray to the 
sewers of the city, where they are speedily over- 
whelmed and dispatched by members of the other 
faction, their inveterate foes and conquerors. 



III. THE KING'S OWN RAT CATCHER. 

Although this black rat is inferior to the brown 
tribe in strength, size, and breeding powers, yet it 
must have been formidable also, for it was formerly 
thought necessary in England to institute the queer 
court position of rat catcher to the King. This was 
probably the case in other countries, too, but no rec- 
ords of it have been kept. According to an old histo- 
rian this English rat catcher was a very dignified and 
mysterious individual, generally with gypsy blood in his 
veins, as it was thought necessary for him to know 
something of the Dark Science to properly perform 
his duties. He was attired in a rich manner, wearing 
a scarlet coat embroidered with yellow worsted on 
which were designed figures of rats and mice destroy- 



30 

ing wheatsheaves. He was looked at with much awe 
by the populace, as lie turned out with a stately tread 
and great pomp, carrying a heavy staff with the insig- 
nia of his exalted office, whenever he took part in the 
royal pageants. This he did regularly, and it is also 
stated that he had an attendant, who never took part 
in the processions but who did the main part of the 
work, always with as much mystery as possible, upon 
the munificent stipend of tuppence a month, while the 
gentleman in the red coat superintended the job and 
received the glory — differing radically in this respect 
from the rat catchers of the present day. 

IV. RAT SOCIETY, CANNIBALISM, AND FRIENDSHIP. 

Animals of nearly all kinds are fond of each other's 
society, and in their natural wild state are always found 
in herds. The city rats live in tribes or colonies of 
from twenty-five to sixty individuals, in the winter 
more and in the summer less. In the cold weather, 
when they are idle or at rest, they lie in one heap for 
the purpose of mutually heating each other. They 
change from the bottom to the top and alternate their 
positions very frequently, so as to give each one an 
opportunity to enjoy the warmer place at the bottom. 
The warmer the locality the less individuals there are 
in a heap. These rats live peacefully enough amongst 
themselves when they have enough to eat, but the 
minute they are apprised of a slightly vacant feeling 
in the region of the stomach they become the most 
savage of animals. 

The mother rat is very careful and fussy about her 
young until they get to a certain age. When they 



31 

have passed this period, however, and the mother 
should, on some bright day, feel a trifle hungry, she 
would as readily devour her offspring as the children 
would make a meal of her, thus returning the compli- 
ment neatly. Individual cases of this kind occur also 
amongst the canine family, where dog-bitches have 
dined royally on a majority of their newly born pups. 
This tends to show that man is not the only intelligent 
animal who occasionally uses his fellow's carcass for 
fodder. Cannibalism, in the rat's case, takes place 
generally when they are unable to get any other diet, 
but then they will devour one another with gusto, 
skin, tail, bones, feathers, and all ; the stronger killing 
the weaker and sucking the blood first. Hot blood is 
one of their greatest delicacies. The rats are born 
blind and naked, and their bodies are at this time of 
their life in a wobbly and unformed state. In this 
condition they would probably not be looked on by 
outsiders as things of beauty or delicate morsels, yet 
they are eagerly sought after by the old male rat to 
furnish him with his Sunday dinner dessert. The 
male pigs, cats, ferrets, and rabbits also indulge in the 
same pastime. This is made still more of a highly 
prized food for the old man rat by its rarity, as the 
mother will fight to protect her young with the bold- 
ness and savageness of a lioness defending her cubs. 
She will even go to the pathetic extent of chewing up 
her young ones herself rather than let them fall into 
the 1 lands of her oppressor. The rats have an arrange- 
ment amongst them similar to the old Greek health 
law of killing off all sickly infants, that is, they eat 
their dead and infirm. This accounts for the fact that 
rats are never found at large sick, diseased, or disabled. 



32 

Although, as a rule, it isn't considered the correct 
thing with us to dine or breakfast from our departed 
fathers-in-law or uncles, yet in the present case, pecu- 
liar as it may seem, it is the only admirable trait about 
the rat, It forms a safeguard to man against their in- 
crease, yet we must add, in a hurry, that the check 
put upon their growth by their cannibalism is lament- 
ably small when compared to their enormous multiply- 
ing powers, which surpass those of any other animal. 
The writer had a curious experience in regard to the 
rat's sociability and companionship. He had once 
confined in a cage a company of twelve big slaughter- 
house rats and happened to neglect feeding them one 
evening. The next morning he was rather astonished 
to find a well polished backbone, a stubby remnant of 
tail, and only eleven other rats, all huddled up together 
compactly, in the congregation, lie then gave them 
some food to stop them from further feeding on each 
other, but they rudely refused this, and he was again 
surprised to see ten of the number make a combined 
attack, that looked as if agreed upon, upon one unfor- 
tunate but especially large sized rat. The latter tried 
desperately enough to hold his own against such fear- 
ful odds, with much horrible squealing and screaming 
among them and a great deal of severe scratching, 
dashing, and tumbling against the tin-lined sides and the 
wire roofing of the cage. In a few seconds they were 
ranged all around in a circle feeding ravenously on the 
remains of the brave but ill-fated warrior. The writer 
has noticed, in numerous instances where numbers of 
rats were kept together in a cage, that they would on 
some occasions, just as the humor seemed to strike 
them, prefer their relatives and brethren as food to 



33 

anything else. It did not matter, cither, what other 
form of diet or delicacy had been set before them. 



V. — MULTIPLYING POWERS. 

Great quantities of rats are trapped and poisoned 
and hunted down by all animals larger than them- 
selves ; they are driven out of their homes, and sys- 
tematically destroyed by paid vermin-destroyers ; still 
all this seems to make but very slight impression on 
their numbers as they constantly pop up serenely from 
below just as if "Sure Pop" and rat-traps had only 
a mythic existence in fairy tales. They multiply 
prodigiously, the female breeding on the average 
about eight times a year, and having as many as four- 
teen at a litter, though in some instances this record 
has been badly beaten. A writer on this subject 
calculates that from a single pair of New York rats, 
living iii moderately good circumstances, there will 
spring in three years' time a snug, happy little family 
of 650,000 rodents, including mother, father, children, 
grandchildren, great-grandchildren, etc., and making 
due allowance for emergencies, accidents, and for a 
few hundred of them having been overpowered and 
used for food by the rest of this most worshipful 
company. lie allows an average of eight young at a 
litter, half male and half female, the young ones 
having a litter at six months old. One cause of their 
being so prolific is that they flourish and breed as well 
on an abundance of swill, refuse, and garbage, as if they 
were carefully and tenderly fed three times a day. 



34 



VI. THE EATS UNABRIDGED BILL OF FARE. 

Next to the ostrich, the rat possesses the most capa- 
cious and accommodating kind of stomach. He will 
swallow anything, digestible or otherwise, although he 
can appreciate good things with much intelligence, 
when he comes across them. His bill of fare ranges 
all the way up from tallow- can dies and shingles to 
roast-partridge and old boots. Rats are broadly om- 
nivorous, and their food varies widely with their 
situation. They will eat soap, from the harsh and 
strong smelling washerwoman's kind to the richly 
perfumed and tinted toilet variety. With a vast and 
admirable toleration, they will feed upon bacon, 
sponges, ham, roots, flour, pork, roast-fowl, from 
boarding-house chicken to the microscopic quail; 
they will consume confectionery, potatoes, tomatoes, 
turnips, other vegetables, fruit of every description, 
from huckleberries to watermelons, raw, boiled, broiled, 
or fried fish, suet, eggs, bread, mutton, cheese, and 
butter. Also raw, cooked, boiled, broiled, fried, 
smoked, or roast-beef, and they swallow with keen 
relish wines of all brands and vintages, beer, whisky, 
gin, and brandy, and evince a loving fondness for all 
grades of oil, from the dirtiest, coarsest whale's 
blubber to the finest olive. The rat is verily a most 
cosmopolitan glutton, and enjoys the favorite dishes 
of the various nations with much the same hearty ap- 
preciation throughout, hugely delighting himself with 
frog's hind-legs in France, pickled herrings in Hol- 
land, potatoes roasted on the hearth in Ireland, pum- 
pernickel and sourk rout in Germany, anise-seed, garlic, 
and olla podrida in Spain, birds'-nest, skarks' fins, and 



35 

meat furnished by the rat's own brethren in China, 
caviare and candles with the Russians, roast-beef and 
ale in England, and pork and-beans and peanuts with 
the people of a certain division of North America. 

Drawing the line at a particular point in the rats' 
endeavors to obtain " belly timber," as Sancho puts it, 
is an obsolete custom with them, for they devour pu- 
trid carrion, and human flesh, too, comes within this 
category, a further account of which will be found in 
the course of the next chapter. 

VII. — FEROCITY. 

The rat is dangerously ferocious when aroused, and 
is capable of being wrought up to a pitch of white 
heat fury. If he should be caught, his tail cut, his 
hair burnt, or if he should be wounded in any other 
way, but not sufficiently to weaken his system or 
momentary capacity, and he is then let loose, he will, 
through sheer madness and pure " cussedness," hunt 
up, fight, and overpower his brethren individually, 
or else put them to flight in a body, without much 
ado. In fact, when he is worked up to this state, 
he wouldn't hesitate for a moment to attack an entire 
army of rats, or of other far bigger and more terrible 
objects. In many cases like this, rats have often 
obligingly rid premises of their own kind. If the 
tortured or maimed rat is in a weak condition after- 
wards, he will be promptly overpowered by the other 
members of the rat community upon general prin- 
ciples. 

.We are often regaled in the newspapers with 
"brutally frank" accounts of people leading their 



36 

babies alone at home, and, upon returning, finding 
them frightfully lacerated by rats, slowly and re- 
luctantly escaping from the scene. In like manner, 
they have become bold enough to attack solitary in- 
valids in houses, who had work enough to defend 
themselves from, and to drive off, these ferocious 
little beasts, driven on by hunger like the true wolves 
of the wilderness. 

Living or dead, man is bound to furnish food for 
the rat ; and in church-yards, where, ghoul-like, they 
choose the night as their time of appearing, they de- 
molish the skeletons, littering the ground with rem- 
nants of the white, shining bones. 



VHI. EATS IN BREWERIES, SLAUGHTER-HOUSES, MARKETS, 

STABLES, AND BARN-YARDS. 

The writer, in the course of his many rat-hunting 
expeditions, has had occasion to observe the rats in 
the lower cellars of many large New York breweries, 
where beer was about all they could get to live on. 
The sage old rodents, I observed, that had become 
accustomed to this diet — and had noted scientifically 
its queer effects in large doses on the rat system — in- 
dulged in a moderate way, and became aged, good- 
natured, and fat, like some jovial, bald-headed old 
merchant of the human type. The young rats, how- 
ever, that had been recruited from the neighboring 
houses, would proceed immediately to paint a limited 
part of the town quite crimson with much hilarious- 
ness and quantities of beer, after which they could be 
killed or caught without much bother, lying around 



37 

through the passage-ways in a beastly intoxicated 
state. Here they lay, squealing faintly, and without 
concern, on their backs. We may find in this, if we 
care to look for it, a really valuable temperance 
lesson ; for, when the rodents imbibed with modera- 
tion, they were of a strong and healthy race, and 
greatly looked up to in the gnawing community ; but, 
when they quaffed too heavily, they became poets, 
and cared not for the affairs of this small earth, 
whereupon they were ignobly killed with a club by 
some base son of man. In slaughter-houses, they 
become so unconscious after having gorged them- 
selves with a hearty dinner of hot blood and other 
warm offal, that hundreds of them could be picked 
up and massacred with but very faint resistance on 
the otherwise cautious rat's part. 

In old markets, rats yet do valuable service as san- 
itary inspectors, by demolishing the amount of refuse 
and garbage ; but in other channels they are the 
very demons of destruction. They are especially 
fond of cheese ; and in the cheese-dealers' stalls they 
go at their work of procuring this in a highly artistic 
way. They drill holes through the flooring beneath 
the largest cheeses, and then work their way up and 
eat into them, consuming pounds upon pounds in a 
single night. The men sometimes find a large cheese 
with the interior scooped entirely out, leaving the 
rind, in hollow mockery, simply an empty, worthless 
shell. In the butchers' shops, the rats are connois- 
seurs in the quality of meat, always seeking out the 
primest portions of the beef in preference to any 
others. 

Around barn-yards they destroy the grain, oats, 



38 

and every species of fowl, from the smallest to the 
largest specimen. In going at their work of destruc- 
tion, they spring upon the neck of the victims, and 
pierce and bite it through with their teeth. They 
then suck the blood first, or else eat into the flesh as 
they would into a cheese, often contenting them- 
selves with the blood and leaving the carcass. In 
stables the harness and the axle grease, even, suffice to 
make a square meal for them in default of better 
fodder; they also make the horses frantic by fiend- 
ishly gnawing at their hoofs. 



IX. EATS AS WINE DEINKEES. 

In a neat and cleverly written little book on Spain, 
it is observed that " in the wine cellars the bungs in 
the heads of the butts containing sweet wines had 
little square pieces of tin nailed over them. This was 
to protect them from the rats who otherwise get upon 
the edge of the butt, and lick the sweet wine which 
oozes through, then begin to nibble the bung, and 
go on, if they are let alone, till out rushes the w T ine in 
a stream." The effects of the rats' ingenuity seems to 
bear rather a kind intention toward his two-legged 
brother, described in the following : " This happened 
not long ago to a large tonel of the finest Pedro Jime- 
nez, which was stored with others in the ground-floor 
of a house, the owner of which was away in Seville, 
with the key, which he would trust to no one, in his 
pocket. One morning out came the bung, long nibbled 
by rats, and about three hundred gallons of the wine 
ran out into the gutter. It was a queer sight, people 
rushing to dip it up with any vessel that #me to hand, 



39 



some of them presently using mops, and the small 
boys, who had found it was sweet, and lapped up as 
much as they could get at, lying around the street in 
various stages of intoxication," after the manner of our 
frisky friends, the joyous rats of the brewery cellars. 



X. DESTRXJCTTVENESS. 

The rat's bite, and especially that of old rats, is very 
poisonous, and its teeth are finely adapted for severe, 
quick, sharp, and deep cutting. It forms an urgent 
natural necessity for them, owing to the peculiar 
structure and growth of their teeth, to keep them in- 
cessantly working. The idea never comes to the rats 
of a possible breaking off of their tusks in attacking 
such flexible objects as bricks or lead, and the writer 
has seen cases in which the rats cheerfully went to 
work gnawing off corners of bricks and granite, in a 
persistent manner, so that they could make an opening 
large enough for their admission into a house. ^Noth- 
ing is exempt from their merciless teeth. They muti- 
late the woodwork on the valuable drawing-room 
chair just as readily as they would the dingiest, most 
plebeian sort of washtub, and they make sad havoc of 
upholstery of all kinds. They seem to have an espe- 
cially lasting grudge against the transmission of knowl- 
edge, for books are gnawed and mutilated by them in 
immense quantities. They gnaw paper, from legal 
documents of the highest value (and many an import- 
ant writing has been hopelessly destroyed by their 
agency), to the most worthless treatise on " Four- 
Fingered -Mike ; or; The Terror of Hoboken." Gur 
clothing, slices, hat-gear, etc., is turned out by the rate 



40 

in a pitifully dilapidated condition. They also eat into 
lead pipes for the purpose of obtaining water, which it 
is hard for them to do without, although we have 
found that they can be without food for a much 
greater length of time. When the rats are pressed for 
drink on board ship, they lay low in the day-time, but 
in the evening they stealthily come out on the deck 
from the hold, in a long row, single file, in order to 
sip the moisture from the rigging. 

By examining the Fire Marshal's Report of New 
York City from 1868 to 1882, we learn that rats have 
been the cause of 70 fires during 12 years, making an 
average of five fires a year. This is on account of the 
rats' strong propensity for nibbling matches. In the 
same report is a warning against tUe loose and careless 
manner in which matches are left in pantries and 
closets infested by rats and mice with a fondness for 
this kind of diet. The great attraction for the rodents 
in the matches is the phosphorus, which these useful 
articles contain in abundance, and which the rats are 
able to scent out from a great distance. 



XI. — RATS AS FOOD. 

If you were lunching on something similar in taste 
to roast partridge, and some one told you, after you 
had finished, that it was only domestic house rat, your 
interior machinery would probably be disarranged — 
to such an extent is the bare mention of the word 
rat repugnant to our senses and stomachs. 

In the course of an experiment, the writer has cooked 
and boiled rats, and has found that their meat is of a 



41 

very tender quality, and of a white, inviting appear- 
ance, withal, although he never went the length of 
partaking of it. Our objection to the rat's serving as 
food is too deeply rooted and profound to be re- 
moved, although there are a great many animals whose 
flesh forms our staple food that have habits much 
dirtier, and who do not nearly live npon as cleanly 
a diet (and this is a broad statement) as our despised 
house rat. From this eulogium we gentlv but firmly 
exclude the rat gentry of the sewers. We must give 
the Chinese credit for having overcome the effete 
European prejudice against the rat as food. Seem- 
ingly, it is the most highly prized dish that the sons 
of leprosy have in their bill of fare. The crews of 
the American and English vessels lying in Canton 
harbor used to amuse themselves greatly in catching 
a rat, and then holding the kicking animal by the 
tail so that the Celestials in the junks alongside could 
get a good view of it. The Mongolians would then 
get very much excited, utter exclamations of a gob- 
bling, clucking sound, and as soon as the splut- 
tering, frightened rat was flung from the ship an 
uproarious scramble followed, that made them look 
like so many monkeys quarreling over a cocoanut. 

A writer tell us, in a well- written magazine article, 
that he has lived fifteen years in China, and has had 
"experience at public banquets, social dinners, and 
ordinary meals, in company with all classes of people, 
but was exceedingly surprised at never having seen 
cat, dog, or rat served up in any form whatsoever." 
We are sorry the gentleman neglects to state whether 
he'd know the difference. The odds are twenty to 
one that he wouldn't ; because, as he knows himself, 



42 

the Chinese are excellent cooks, and can prepare a 
good meal from what in other countries would be 
thought offal. He makes the admission, however, 
that " there are some peculiar people in China, 
as well as elsewhere — credulous and superstitious — 
some of whom believe that the flesh of dogs, cats, 
and rats, possesses medicinal properties. For instance, 
some silly women believe that the flesh of rats restores 
the hair ; some believe that dog meat and cat meat 
renews the blood, and quacks often prescribe it. 
What the Chinese really do eat does not vary much 
from that found on American tables ; but there are 
certain dishes not on our programmes that are con- 
sidered delicacies by everybody — such as edible bird's- 
nests and sharks' fins." To this we can add con- 
scientiously, and upon weighty private authority — 
fried split rat, stewed dog, and curried cat with rice. 
In this place it would be appropriate of us to say 
something of the peculiarities of Chinese food — of 
the way the dogs and cats are carefully bred for the 
palates of the Chinese epicures ; how these former 
animals are invitingly exposed for sale in the market- 
places ; and we would willingly describe the methods 
of the dog and cat breeders, and the manner of curing 
and cooking the rats — but want of space forbids. We 
will merely state that there are many cases in which 
rats were eaten much nearer home than China ; but, 
as the persons undertaking the experiment were slowly 
starving to death, and would have quickly eaten each 
other rather than accept the jolly alternative of dying 
by hunger, these instances are not of a remarkable 
nature, and are consequently unworthy of note in the 
present annals. 



43 



XII. EAT NESTS. 



Rats are impartial in their building sites — they have 
contentedly built their nests in the wretched and 
filthy peasant's hovel and in the most palatial and 
luxurious residences of kings, and a human habitation 
must indeed be in the extreme of squalor, dirt and 
decay where they are not found sprawling. Shake- 
speare pithily expresses this in the " Tempest :" 

" In few tliey hurried us aboard a bark, 
Bore us some leagues to sea, where they prepar'd 
A rotten carcass of a boat, not rigg'd, 
Nor tackle, sail nor mast — the very rats 
Instinctively had quit it." 

The rat living in a house prefers warm, soft 
quarters, and invariably gets within comfortable dis- 
tances of stoves, ranges, heaters, steam-pipes, etc. 
This is a very dangerous habit, because his nest is 
always constructed of inflammable materials. At 
times he also lugs matches into it, and then if the 
steam-pipes should become overheated, the matches 
blaze up and spread the flames. We have read in the 
newspapers of a great many fires afterwards found to 
have been caused in this way. The rat's nest is made 
of black and colored silk, of linen, woolen and cotton 
materials, bits of canvas, dirty rags, fur, silk stock- 
ings, and antique lace of much value jumbled together 
with string and crumpled paper. In one instance we 
knew of a rat to make use of a building material more 
out of the ordinary run than these, as it consisted 
simply of fifteen hundred dollars in greenbacks that 
had been put under the carpet of a room for safe 
keeping, and which was afterwards found in mutilated 
fragments, thatched together, forming this queer old 



mercenary rat's abode. The rat uses his nest too as a 
storehouse, and here he lays by quantities of edibles 
for a rainy day. The writer came across a nest, once 
upon a time, the sole building materials of which were 
those undergarments, both masculine and feminine, 
fashioned so slenderly, but which we dare not mention. 
This nest contained a peck or eo of beans, though in 
the house where it was built beans had not been 
stored nor used, the writer found out, for at least 
three months. Out of doors or in fields the rats' 
nests are built of hay, leaves, shavings, and wool. 
The rat is, besides his other praiseworthy qualities, an 
inveterate old thief, and in decorating his dwelling 
picturesquely he becomes quite lavish, as gold rings, 
diamonds, jewels of every value, and gold and silver 
watches, that had been missed, were found in rat 
nests. Here they were generally discovered set off 
with much taste by a piece of salt bag. In one rat's 
nest I found a set of false teeth in perfect condition. 
The rat could not have wanted to use them himself, 
because they were several sizes too big for him. He 
probably wanted them for a tool-box or jewel-case or 
some other equally useful object. The writer remem- 
bers reading in some odd book of a good-natured per- 
son who had discovered a family of young rats in a 
piano that stood in a room for some time unfrequented. 
They had made themselves so much at home in the 
interior of the instrument that the owner was un- 
willing to disturb them by playing upon it. The 
female rat probably wanted to get her young to some 
safe place away from her liege lord, and had succeeded 
in gnawing up through the leg of the piano. She 
had brought with her, in which to build a nest, a dirty 



45 

striped stocking big enough to have belonged to some 
distinguished Dime Museum fat lady. 



xin. — the rat's musical talents and eyesight. 

Hats love sweet, soft, melodious tones, and a great 
many experiments have been made in taming rats 
thereby, but only with indifferent success upon the 
sharp-witted rodents, in spite of all the pretty stories 
to the contrary in the reading-books. So high is the 
rat's musical understanding rated, that there is a prov- 
erb among the people that rats immediately disap- 
pear from the house as soon as a young lady begins 
taking lessons on the piano. A mouth-harmonica 
seems to be the rat's favorite musical instrument, and 
its gentle strains exert the most power over him, far 
more than the tones of any other instrument. If the 
music be soft, mild, and pathetic, the rat will listen 
and come very near, for he is a very susceptible sort 
of beast, and, if closely observed, tears of sorrow, or 
of sad and tender reminiscence, will be seen coursing 
slowly down his cheeks. But if, on the contrary, the 
music be harsh, shrill, and discordant, such as would 
most likely be ground out by beginners, or if it proceed 
from a brass instrument, or drum, or if it be occasioned 
by a shotgun report, or explosion, it may drive the im- 
pressionable animals from places where they had been 
used to frequent. If, however, one is unsuccessful in 
trying to scare off the rats by noise at the first inning, 
a repetition will be of no avail. 

The rat will take up his nest in all and any out-of- 
the-way places, as he shuns the light and lives wholly 



46 

in the dark and gloom. This is the cause of his poor 
sight ; he can hardly see at all in the daytime, and in 
the night a little better. If yon should meet with a 
rat by day, looking square in your face, depend upon 
it he isn't able to see you at all, in spite of the pretty 
gleam in his black eyes. His minutely acute ears, 
however, do him good service instead of eyes, so that 
he has very little occasion to miss the latter at all. 

The rat is generally very timid, and extremely nerv- 
ous, the slightest disturbance repelling him and 
making him shrink into obscurity and shadow. Yet 
it is his great peculiarity that he can adapt himself to 
any extremity of climate or description of place ; he 
is found making himself at home in hotels, factories, 
public gardens, and other haunts of loud and constant 
noise, bustle, and confusion. 



XIV. RATS AS MORALISTS. 

The Lord in making the rats is imputed to have 
done so to have them serve as scavengers for his 
wandering, wasteful tribes of children. But in our 
own day, as the majority of us do not wander, nor 
have wandered continually for the last two or three 
thousand years or so, and have slapped up many sup- 
posedly permanent villages like London, New York, 
or Paris, the restless, ambitious rat took into his head 
not to limit himself to such dirty kind of work exclu- 
sively. He then formed the resolution, and further 
carried out the purposes of his creator by taking 
upon himself the philosophic office of keeping man's 
pride in check. This he did by literally chipping a 



47 

large proportion of the gilt off man's earthy grandeur, 
and by destroying his works and belongings at every 
possible opportunity, with right hearty good-will and 
much perseverance. " Therefore," says a writer, 
" whatever man does, rat always takes a share in the 
proceedings. Whether it be building a ship, erecting 
a church, digging a grave, plowing a field, storing a 
pantry, taking a journey, or planting a distant colony, 
rat is sure tQ have something to do in the matter; 
man and his gear can no more get transplanted from 
place to place without him, than without the ghost in 
the wagon that < flitted too '." 



XV. RATS IN THE GOOD OLD DAYS, AND THE MODERN 

RAT SUPERSTITIONS. 

In the merry days of old, rats were regarded as un- 
disputed signs of witchcraft, and even scholars ack- 
nowledged this — at least they were compelled to, by 
the help of a blazing pile of faggots, or similar mild 
means known only to the good old times. What 
caused this belief among the people was, that an 
animal appearing to them so small should be the cause 
of such intense and continual annoyance to them. 
There was no barrier through which the rat could 
not effect its way to get at a certain object, thanks to 
its wonderful powers of gnawing. It was so om- 
nivorous, ferocious, and destructive, that the people 
endowed the rat with superhuman qualities, and re- 
garded it as a true child of the Devil, put upon this 
earth to be always pestering them. In regard to the 
rat's superhuman qualities, it appears to have cer- 



48 

tainly displayed more reason and acuteness, fighting 
in the daily battle of life, than any one of these thick- 
skulled humans could lay claim to. It was looked on 
with a great and most unreasonable aversion and 
loathing, born of superstition and fear, and which we 
find vehemently expressed in all the ancient books on 
the subject. This feeling, we cannot help believing, 
is not dead yet, according to the astounding anecdotes 
brought forth and widely copied in a great many of 
our American newspapers. The facts and data given 
in these learned articles about the rat's size, weight, 
and habits, in general, would make his hair stand on 
end with horror if he were to read them. As a matter 
of fact, the ordinary brown rat, which we find every- 
where near man, is a pretty black-eyed, softly robed, 
and delicately constructed little animal ; and although 
his fur may be plainly colored, like the plumage of the 
sparrow amongst birds, yet it is of the finest texture, 
and, when possible, is always kept scrupulously clean. 
In solitary captivity he is continually sitting on his 
haunches, cleaning his fur like a cat ; and the writer 
has found, by actual experiment, the weight of twelve 
full-grown, well-fed 2s ew York city rats to amount to 
exactly twelve and a half pounds. 

Formerly, in European countries, there was a gen- 
eral belief in the existence of strange and mysterious 
relations between this great slimy monster and the 
high-priests of witchcraft and sorcery. It was thought 
that this was the animal best adapted to carry out 
the diabolical plots of his Satanic majesty. In one 
part of Norway, the peasants used devoutly to hold 
a fast day once a year, trusting thereby to get rid of 
the pests of rats and mice. They had a Latin ex- 



49 

orcism which they used on these occasions, beginning 
with the words, "Exerciso nos pestiferos, vermes 
mures," etc. Anything a rat left its trace upon was 
an omen of ill to the owner; and when by any chance 
a rat was ever seen on a cow's back the poor animal 
was doomed to pine slowly to death in consequence. 
In Ireland it was believed that premises could be rid 
of rats by reciting a rhyme over their holes, which was 
commonly called " rhyming rats to death." 



XVI. REVIEW OF THE EAT, AND CONCLUSION. 

But since these times the people have succeeded in 
getting rid of a great quantity of superstition attached 
to the subject. It has also been learned gradually 
that the actions of the rat are prompted much more by 
natural than by diabolical instinct. However timorous 
and innocent looking we have found the rat to be 
upon impartial observation, yet his is a case of wolf in 
sheep's clothing, for he is the one of the whole brute 
creation that does the most undermining damage in 
every way to the homes, workshops, counting-rooms, 
store-houses and cultivated fields and acres of man. 
The rat is also at times his very ferocious personal 
enemy. The rat's code of morals will be found rather 
deficient, as we have tried to explain in the preceding 
rambling remarks. In fact, there are condensed in this 
small animal all the vices of the animal world. We 
have shown him in the pleasant light of a cannibal 
briefly making an end of all family ties by transfer- 
ring his relatives down his stomach. We have traced 



50 

a faint outline of his great food greediness and his in- 
temperance in strong drink, which is pretty near up to 
the human standard. We have pictured his strong 
liking for the hot blood of man and his utterly lack- 
ing an organ of veneration, digging up man's bones 
from their final resting-place to have them serve as 
food. 

The strongest weapon the rats have against man, 
ranking even above their wonderfully constructed 
teeth, are their prodigious multiplying powers, " and," 
says Richardson, " if the rats were suffered to increase 
in numbers, unchecked, the time would not be far dis- 
tant when the entire globe would but suffice to furnish 
food for their rapacious appetites to the exclusion of 
the human race." The only way man can hold his 
own against their mighty ravages and prevent his 
whole social organization from being undermined by 
them, is to wage a steady and unrelenting war, by the 
help of his own arts and the animals specially assigned 
by nature to do service for him as police, against the 
most bloodthirsty, cruel, and acute of enemies. 



RAT EXTERMINATION. 



There are three ways of rat extermination, viz.: 1, 
Traps. 2, Poisons. 3, Cats, Dogs, and Ferrets. There 
is also rat-catching by men, but, as that is generally 
looked upon as a mere gymnastic exercise, it cannot be 
put among the remedies. We will first give some 
practical hints on 

i. — TEAPS. 

The rat is by no means one of the least intelligent 
of quadrupeds, and there is one thing we feel solid 
about — when he knows you really want to trap him 
he'll do his level best to avoid your kind intentions. 
There are shoals of ingenious rat-traps with plenty of 
mechanism in them that are certainly good if you 
don't advertise them to the rats, this being equal to 
saying politely, " Look out, rats, this is a trap for you 
with a bait." After you have put out this charitable 
notice, nary a rodent will you catch. We will now 
show how most people, after catching a lone specimen, 
give themselves "dead away," to speak in classic- 
language, to all the rats there are in the neighborhood. 
Get a trap, no matter of what shape, material, or brand, 
but by all means get one that doesn't let the rat out 
again after he has been once caught. Bait it with 
anything nice and tempting, and put it near the rat- 
hole, just where they come out, any time before you go 
to bed. In the morning you probably find you have 



52 

caught a rat — maybe a big, grizzled old fellow with a 
scabby tail, or else a young one half frightened to 
deatli — anyway it is a rat, and a real live one at that, 
and you can forthwith proceed to kill him. Now 
clean your trap and smoke it out. Bait it again with 
the same care, and hundred to one you find — no rat in 
the cage. The mystery of it is this : The first rat 
that came out of the hole on the first night saw you 
had put down something for him, so he sniffed the 
dainty bait and remarked to himself softly that he 
was a devilish lucky dog, and that he had struck a free 
spread all to himself. With that he entered — the 
trap snapped harshly and cruelly, and the nervous 
little animal became frightened and sought to escape 
from his seeming abode of luxury. He couldn't get 
out, squealed long and plaintively, and worked hard 
against the sides of his prison. Bye and bye all the 
other rats come out to see the cause of all the racket. 
They then find that their friend has been dolefully 
sold, and together register and keep a vow to steer 
clear of your trap religiously ever afterwards. This is 
why you only catch one rat and no more, for a much 
more stupid and less nervous animal than a rat is 
would keep away from a similar arrangement in the 
future. We will now try the experiment over again 
in a somewhat different fashion. Suppose we select a 
big round trap with falling doors at the sides and a 
hole on top — this you can buy in any hardware store. 
First be sure that the doors lift up and fall down very 
easily. If the bottom of the trap is of wire, place it 
on sawdust so that the rats are comfortable in it. Put 
the trap away from the hole, near the wall of the 
cellar, if in winter near the warmest place, always in a 



53 

dark spot. As lie likes comfort so much, put a bag 
over the trap, so that he can find the falling doors 
easily. Get some rags scented with about fifteen 
drops of either oil of rhodium, oil of caraway, oil of 
aniseed, or a mixture of these oils. First tie a string 
around them and swob them around the rat-holes, 
then drag them on the ground near the wall to the 
place where the rat-trap is, and rub the rags well over 
the trap, then put them in. Have some uice tempting 
bait in the trap, either carrots, meat, broiled bacon, or 
cheese — anything fresh will do, but be careful to put 
in enough of it. If the trap is placed as we have 
above directed, the rat will get in and not try to 
escape. Make the trap as much unlike a trap and as 
much like a natural hiding-place as possible. If this 
is done it is highly probable you will have your cage 
chock full of rats the next morning. It is very seldom 
this fails, but if it should not succeed the first night 
proceed as follows : Put the trap exactly as I have 
told you, with the exception to tie up the sliding 
doors. Let it stand there until the rats have eaten it 
out several times, replacing the bait. After the rats 
get used to frequent the place and think they have a 
" soft snap " on you, let down your falling doors again 
and you have them all ! 

Another good one is the little spring-trap that looks 
like the one usually set for foxes. [Never put any bait 
on it, as the rat's neck movement is very quick, and 
you will invariably find the bait gone, and no rodent 
to account for it. Put your trap down in the natural 
run of the rats, around swill barrels, and anywhere 
else you know them to frequent. Always watch your 
traps. You can put down as many as you like, and — 



54 

here comes the whole secret — remove your trap and 
rat as quick as he is caught, so that one rat knows 
nothing whatever of the other's fate. Never put down 
any more of these traps than you can attend to. When 
you stop, always remove all the traps, as a rat may be 
caught and stay there, which will spoil all your future 
sport. Square traps, in which only one rat can be 
caught, should be emptied as soon as filled, and re- 
quires watching also. The round and spring traps 
are the best ones invented yet ; this I am saying after 
many years of practical rat-trap experience. 



n. — POISONS. 

The common rat poisons are arsenic, strychnine, and 
paris-green. They are all put up by enterprising 
people under a multitude of suggestive names, with- 
out, however, specifying the kind of poisons used, or 
even a warning of their being poisonous, as the law 
implicitly directs. There is a great deal of criminal 
negligence in the way they are put upon the market, 
as in some the proportion of poison is so great that it 
would kill an elephant, whereas it should be exactly 
graded to the rat's capacity. The proportion of ar- 
senic in one very much advertised poison now in use, 
as analyzed by Dr. Otto Grothe, a Brooklyn chemist, 
consists of 98.19 percent arsenic, and 1.81 per cent 
admixtures, coal, etc. Would-be suicides and mur- 
derers have made use of these poisons extensively. 
Poisons in powdery form, such as arsenic, strychnine, 
etc., are liable, very easily indeed, to get mixed up 
with food, and have been a powerful death-dealing 
agency. Their peculiar effect is to allow the rats to 



55 

get overdoses, causing violent vomiting, followed by 
complete failure to kill, or drive out. The Phosphoric 
Paste, the " Sure Pop " brand of which is manufactured 
by the present writer, is free from most of these ob- 
jections, as it is simply in salve form, and very hard 
to get mixed up with edibles of any kind. It is im- 
possible for the rats to get overdoses of it, and the 
phosphorus has the effect of burning and irritating 
them inside, making them run for fresh air. Arsenic 
and strychnine are usually prepared in such heavy 
quantities that the rats very quickly die in the holes. 
On the other hand, the amount of poisonous matter in 
this Phosphoric Paste has been exactly proportioned 
to the rat's system, making the amount of poison very 
slight. Of course, there are different ways of making 
this preparation, although there is no secret at all in 
it, but it requires experience and study of the rat's 
nature, preferences, and habits, to make it so that it 
will work with proper effect. The smell of phos- 
phorus is more attractive to the rat than anything 
else, as we have practically seen on page 40 of " The 
Eat." 

HI. — DOGS, CATS, AND FEERETS. 

"We have demonstrated clearly the ferret's advan- 
tages as a rat exterminator, in the animal division of 
remedies, but we cannot help acknowledging the 
claims of cats and dogs, who are excellent in their 
way, although there is a large percentage that are 
worthless for this purpose, because of their cowardice, 
laziness, and dirty habits. We can regulate the ferret 
through his stomach, so that he will be a thorough 
hunter; and as he then knows nothing else but to 



56 

hunt, he will not go out of his way to steal any food 
in a house, like a cat, with its superior intelligence, 
would. Cats and dogs have no value in hunting rats, 
their powers are simply limited to killing. Besides 
this, cats and dogs are often petted so much that they 
lose their useful character, and became entirely orna- 
mental, often running off for all they are worth, at the 
mere sight of a rat's left ear. A good, vigorous cat, 
or dog, may scare off the rats, but when the latter 
retire to the holes they are quite safe from further 
injuries, whereas the ferret, with its india-rubber 
joints, pursues to the death. We have used many cats 
and dogs, but we cannot recommend them in any 
degree, compared to the ferret. Dogs and ferrets, and 
cats and ferrets, as we have remarked in " The Ferret," 
make an effective team if trained. 



THE ORIGIN OF THE FERRET. 

WITH HINTS TO DARWIN. 



We have stated, in the first chapter of this book, that 
the verb " ferret " is derived from the animal of the 
same name, but many savants, and even "plain peo- 
ple," as Lincoln said, have cudgeled their brains try- 
ing to trace from whence the animal has derived its 
name. After long and tedious delving into histories 
and musty tomes having even the slightest bearing on 
the subject, we are able herewith to enlighten these 
gentlemen. For this illumination they have long 
been waiting, we have no doubt, with the utmost 
anxiety and impatience. This requires us to go at length 
into the matter, and entails "upon us the writing of the 
ferret's development from prehistoric times until 
merged into the animal of to-day, with its present 
shape, instincts, and habits. In the course of the 
essay we also prove conclusively that the animal 
originally comes from America. Many scientists will 
no doubt deem it peculiar to find us using many 
modern and untechnical terms in the following 
history, but let them rest assured that if we were to 
make use of our extensive scientific knowledge of the 
subject it would compel them to hunt up all the 
lexicons that had ever been compiled ! 



58 

In the very good and very old days before our pres- 
ent reckoning, when mankind sported tails and was 
protected against the wind and weather by a long, 
hairy covering, and when both animals and man had a 
language of their own — in those times it was that two 
fair- sized buck Martens, one of the Beech and the 
other of the Stone species, stood on the southern point 
of what is now called Cape Farewell, in Greenland, 
longitude 30° 30' east, latitude 60° 2' north. They 
trembled violently from excitement, because they 
had just finished a friendly set-to of 64 rounds, lasting 
3 hours 10 minutes, New York time, and which both 
had so far survived. The referee, an old good-natured 
fox, saw with his keen orf-eye that there was no more 
fight in either of them, and pronounced the battle a 
draw, telling them to try it again on some future day, 
whereupon he speedily took his departure, as he was 
very busy just at that time umpiring base-ball games. 
The contestants then shook fore paws, a custom which 
has survived the centuries, and after a little cold water 
and rest had restored them they mended their broken 
friendship and made solemn pledges not to try harm- 
ing each other any more. They further made a bar- 
gain to set up a business firm, which meant in those 
days, as it does now, division of spoils. In the 
language of that time the Beech Marten was called 
Ver, and his partner, the Stone Marten, Beet, there- 
fore the firm was called " The Yer and Eect Bill-of- 
Fare Improving Co." This title explains part of their 
object in making the trip described in the following 
pages. The other agreements were to do it in perfect 
harmony, and at the end of their pilgrimage to stick 
forever by that particular diet that had suited them 



59 

best. They were both very glad of their compact, be- 
cause each one had formed a high opinion of the 
other's powers evidenced in the pummeling of one 
another's ribs. Talking things over leisurely, they 
found themselves getting hungry, and as their stomach 
was and is yet the Mainspring of their actions, they 
resolved to start immediately on the expedition. 
After they had traveled 48 hours due south-east (a 
direction which they instinctively followed all through 
their wanderings) they had the good luck to stumble 
upon a small but very fat pig, snoring comfortably on 
the banks of a river, known then as the Atlantic river, 
but since developed into the ocean of the same name, 
a further account of which is given further on. Ver 
and Rect found the stream about the size of our pres- 
ent Hudson as it flows by Weehawken. The partners 
accordingly killed the pig without much bother, ate it, 
and took a short nap (for those times) of three days, 
and after waking they stretched themselves, hopped 
around, and took a drink from the river, but no sooner 
had they swallowed a little of the water than they 
commenced spitting, spluttering, and twisting their 
faces into all shapes, as the water was very salt and 
brackish. Eating the very fat pig and drinking the 
salt water had not agreed with Ver and Rect, and 
they put down the following on the tablets of their 
minds for future reference : " Fat pig bad feed — salt 
water ditto." Hence all their descendants, right up to 
this day, never indulge in pork or use salt at all. 

Yer, who wore spectacles, then took the reckoning, 
and found they had just traveled 1910 prehistoric 
miles, quite a distance for those days. The firm re- 
solved lazily to start again, and after yawning a good 



60 

deal, and lying in the sun a little while longer, they 
still felt unpleasant fat-pig and salt-water sensations. 
They paddled across the Atlantic river, and by the 
time they had arrived on the other side they had no 
objection to lunching again, and as fortune seemed to 
favor them, they spied in the distance a very big wood- 
chuck. After an exciting chase, Yer and Rect 
captured him, and at first devoured him with vim. 
The poor Martens, however, were doomed to disap- 
pointment, for when they had bolted their prize and 
had taken their usual nap of three days, they woke up 
with great pains in their much-abused interior depart- 
ments. They thought the woodchuck business over 
carefully and made this inward memorandum : " Wood- 
chuck may be very good, but we prefer lead-pipe." 

Four days after the feast of the woodchuck, wander- 
ing on rather discontentedly, they were suddenly de- 
lighted by a wonderful change in the climate, that had 
previously been harsh and cold, but was now mild and 
radiant. Birds were singing from beautiful trees, 
Nanny and Billy goats, and sheep were gamboling 
about cheerfully. Lions and wolves were doing a 
thriving business, and, just like the bulls and bears of 
to-day, were all living on the poor lambs. The Mar- 
tens wandered about a mile through this happy land, 
and in course of time, bethinking themselves of their 
sacred mission, they fell to work on a Billy goat, who 
was slain, after a hard fight, as an offering to their 
great god, The Stomach. It is evidenced by our 
records that this goat must have been a huge animal, 
for Yer and Rect lived three days on his carcass, 
although at the end of this time they felt rather 
sick. The entry in their inward journal was as fol- 



61 

lows : " Disgusted with Billy goat ; hopes of finding 
our steady food very gloomy." Rect began to feel 
discouraged, but Yer cheered him up, saying unto 
him : " Rec', I have a feeling within my bones which 
tells me our promised land of Good Feed draws near. 
Brace up thy suspenders, and let us be of good mien 
and travail onward, for there is no philosopher on 
earth of a cheerful temper with his belly unhinged." 
Verily, after a two days' journey, they observed, to 
their joy, right on their road, a great mountain over- 
grown with timber and underbrush. Upon reaching 
it, they found it full of game of all kinds, some of 
which they began to attack immediately. Among 
others they caught a little, delicate gray rabbit, and 
after critically tasting its flesh, were delighted with its 
flavor. They thought now they had found a solid 
bill-of-fare material, and made arrangements for stay- 
ing in the place by digging themselves comfortable 
beds under the roots of a big tree. There was such 
an abundance of these delicious rabbits that Yer and 
Rect concluded they had enough of a wandering life, 
and that the mission of the " Bill -of -Fare Improving 
Co." was fulfilled. They called the land, on account 
of the great number of these little animals, Engelland, 
meaning the land of the Engels, or angels, at present 
England. Having kept bachelor's hall for awhile 
under the big tree, they formed the acquaintance of 
some of their rich neighbors, who were very kind to 
them, and whom the Martens found to be relatives of 
theirs. To Yer and Rect's former pastimes of hunt- 
ing, eating, drinking (cold water), and sleeping, they 
now added courting. Yer acquainted himself with a 
pretty young Miss Weasel, a blonde, and paid her 



63 

attention, and Rect took fancy to a handsome and 
stately Miss Mink, a brunette. In two hours after 
their first courtship — the thing was done quicker in 
those days — Yer and Rect were married men. They 
begot children, grandchildren, and great-grand- 
children, who in their turn intermarried into the 
families of the Sables, the Pitches, and the Ermines, but 
all the descendants of Yer and Rect went under the 
name of Yer-Rects, afterwards verrects, until it has 
been gradually mellowed into our present ferrets. 
The ferrets now lived in the woods of old Engelland, 
hunting and eating rabbits and enjoying themselves 
with all their families on this only ingredient of their 
bill-of-fare, which Yer and Rect thought of making 
the permanent ferret food by law. Of course the 
ferrets grew into the most expert of rabbit-hunters, 
and they have retained this ability to the present day. 
Never after they had been in Engelland did Yer or 
Rect or their descendants subsist on pigs, wood- 
chucks, or billy-goats. One morning a great accident 
happened, which brought them a different kind of 
food, consisting of a large army of black rats. The 
way it happened was this : The earth on which we 
now live, and which swings around at a pretty good 
gait on its own axle, broke it right near the north 
pole and all the waters spilled out there. They over- 
flowed the Atlantic river 1500 miles on each side, and 
thus formed our present Atlantic Ocean. The high 
mountain of England was just saved from the water, 
making it an island, and just then 750,000 live rats 
swam on shore to save themselves from drowning. 

The ferrets killed a few of these rats to experiment 
upon, and were more than delighted with the tender 



$3 

meat, Yer and Rect making the ferret's bill-of-fare 
for all ages chiefly consist of rabbits and rats. Some- 
times the ferrets went rabbit and sometimes rat-hunt- 
ing, and were as expert in the one as in the other, and 
so it is that the ferret of to-day occupies itself, by the 
mandates of its forefathers, Yer and Rect, in the 
vigorous hunting throughout all lands of the rat and 
the rabbit. From whence the rats came before they 
arrived in England will be found in the next chapter. 



THE CONTINUATION OF THE FORMER CHAPTER. 

Our rats are from China, The proof of this will be 
found in more particularly observing the rat's looks, 
vices and nature, the manner in which he carries his 
(pig) tail, and further, the great love of the Chinaman 
for him. We contend also that the Chinaman and the 
rat are relatives, for it can be said of both, as it has 
been said of one, 

" That for ways that are dark, 
And for tricks that are vain, 
The heathen Chinee is peculiar." 

So we say positively that the rat is Chinese, and 
there is no record that can prove the contrary. The 
rats were kept locked up in that great empire of solid 
fences before they showed themselves to the other 
countries of the earth. Forty years before the great 
Yer and Rect battle, 750,000 big rats, with their tails 
out straight, like real Chinese pig-tails, concluded to 
make an exodus out of the heavenly territory, under 
the leadership of 75 big chiefs. They didn't want to 



64 

leave particularly, but they were afraid of being 
starved out altogether, or else murdered for food by 
the Chinese army. After the rats had put themselves 
in battle array, and were duly formed in procession, 
the 75 big chiefs, who were distinguished from the 
others by their big red noses and muscular forms, held 
a council. At the end of a three days' session, during 
which a great many speeches had been made and a 
good deal of fighting had been going on, a very old 
political rat-boss arose and made a proposition. His 
speech was about as follows : " Honored Rats, and 
fellow-citizens : I have been a rat for a good many 
years, and don't want to change my business. I must 
say I like being a rat. But if we are hacked up in 
soup, or starved out completely, 1 have my doubts of 
our staying powers. Countrymen and lovers, this is 
what we are threatened with, and we must move. 
Where to ? is the question that arises, and I have 
thought it over. The climate is hot to suffocation and 
very unhealthy here ; let us trust to luck and go west, 
as a friend of mine said on a similar occasion. ' Go 
West, young man, go West,' I say unto you now, 
and I advise you to do so as speedily as possible." 
This speech was received with " tremendous applause" 
for the old rat waxed very eloquent, and the " go west" 
resolution was passed unanimously. An amendment 
was put in, changing the course to north-west, for the 
meeting was held during such hot weather, that some 
of the radicals wanted to start out immediately and settle 
on the North Pole. They were promptly overruled, 
of course, and the 750,000 rats, including males and 
females, wandered on slowly in their chosen direction, 
increasing on the road to a wonderful extent. The 



65 

council concluded to hold a thorough count or census 
of rats, and each male rat, it was provided, should not 
be bashful about coming forward and giving the true 
number of his whole family — no doctoring of the re- 
turns allowed. After the count was completed, all the 
rats over and above the original amount, 750,000, 
agreed to stay in the country they had arrived at. 
The originals kept on moving towards the north- 
west, but the others filled up every section of the 
earth they passed through. The rats made friends 
with neither man nor animal on their journey. First 
they made a stop in a state where all the owls — although 
they were countrymen of the rats, having emigrated 
from China — fell upon them, and there was a pitched 
battle, the rats afterwards hiding themselves in their 
holes under ground after losing a great many in dead 
and wounded. One day they agreed to make an ex- 
cursion out of the line of their route and so take in 
Egypt. In a few weeks they here ate up all the corn 
from the fields, stealing and hiding away anything 
edible, and quite creating a panic, but always fighting 
shy of the daylight. We read in the histories of a 
great locust plague in Egypt, about this time, but on 
this point we have a revelation to make. The locust 
was just as innocent of this crime as it is of building the 
Brooklyn Bridge — it was the rats that did it. When 
the rats arrived in Greece they scored a signal victory, 
because it was there that they extirminated a whole 
nation — the mice — and the former have strongly held 
this country ever since. We are authentically informed, 
by reference to our own private rat historian's notes of 
this trip, that the first place the rats met their great 
enemy, the Dog, was in Ancient Rome, where the 



66 

dogs were put on them by man with much success, and 
here the rats could get no firm foothold. This caused 
them a roundabout journey north, and when they 
thought they had pretty well established themselves 
in ancient Gaul, now France, they were raided by a 
strange tigerish kind of animal which proved afterwards 
a lasting antagonist of theirs — the Cat. The poor 
rodents found here the other enemies they had en- 
countered on the road, the owl and the dog, who were 
always urged on fiercely by man. While the rats were 
struggling along in France, the land was convulsed by 
an earthquake, causing the Atlantic river's banks to be 
overflowed. This submerged the land on which the 
rats were, and as they all could swim they headed 
their course for England, the nearest dry land. It 
was here the ferrets joined man, dogs, cats and owls, 
but the more the rats were hunted, the more acute 
and crafty they got to be, until they found out innu- 
merable hiding-places and ways of preservation, so we 
have them still with us to-day. We thus close our 
story of research, through which we have shown 
America as the birthplace of the ferret, China of the 
rat, and England as the first country employing ferrets 
for rat-hunting. 



FERRETS: 



SURE POP BREED. 



RAISED AND TRAINED 



BY THE 



AUTHOR OF THIS BOOK. 



EVERY FERRET SOLD IS WARRANTED AS 
REPRESENTED. 



DEPOT-92 FULTON STREET, 



NEW YORK CITY. 



HOUSES CLEARED 



RATS 



WITH FERRETS, 



CONTRACT, 



DEPOT-92 FULTON STREET, 



NEW YORK CITY. 



SURE POP 



PHOSPHORIC PASTE, 



FOR THE 



DESTRUCTION OF 



Rats, Mice, and Roaches, 



MANUFACTURED BY 



<< 



SURE POP"ISAACSEN, 



PRINCIPAL, DEPOT: 



92 FULTON STREET, 



NEW YORK CITY. 



SURE POP 

Insect* Powder 



FOR THE 



DESTRUCTION OK 

Roaches, Bed Bags, Ants, Fleas, Flies, Mosquitoes, 

Moths, Spiders, Scorpions, Centipedes, Plant 

and Animal Lice, Groton Bugs, etc., etc., etc. 



OWN IMPORTATION AND WARRANTED THE 
BEST IN THE WORLD. 



PRINCIPAL DEPOT: 

92 FULTON STREET, 

NEW YORK CITY. 



SURE POP 

INSECT POWDER KILLERS. 



This valuable little instrument was patented by me years ago. 
It is a handly little machine for dusting the Insect Powder 
around. It is made of vulcanized rubber, having a metallic top. 



PRINCIPAL DEPOT: 

92 FULTON STREET, 

NEW YORK CITY. 
SURE POP 

Patent Insect Powder Bellows. 

Patented April 29, 1884. 
Number op Patent, 297,693. 

THE ADVANTAGES OF THIS MACHINE OVER ALL OTHERS ARE: 

i. It is easily loaded. 

2. There is no waste of powder. 

3. The Powder can not get back into the Bellows. 

4. The top can not get worked off. 

5. The Bellows are made under my own supervision, and 

every one is guaranteed. 



HOUSES CLEARED 



OF' 



Roaches, Bed Bugs, Ants, Fle>s, 



OR ANY KIND OF 




VERMIN 




33"5T COKTTHACT, 



PRINCIPAL DEPOT: 



92 FULTON STREET, 



NEW YORK CITY. 



«c ■ 


<sc 


c 


<3C 


<: 


<<d 


d 


c *^ 


d 


,<: ^-. 








<*L 



. ..C<: <.. 



<;■• v <1: 



ST.. <• < 



Ice <T>C < ' 



c: <- .c 
C <~ c 






c c < '■ < cc ^ 

c. < <<" 
d c C ? 
<r c o 

c: c cc 



I ■ 



<r c: 



c c 

l_ r ofc-. 

<: 

_^3 ** • 

' c 
~< <sc .. 



<T C 






c c » «*-_ 



«*C_C C «C ^ <rr 5 

" <• c C C ; ,' C 

«c «c_c* , «L_ d <- 

«^ -^Z5« we.- 
«: <H c« <: 

<7 c «CI <S^- ' 



^ <Z C <!_ 



C<1 

< <^ 



c < 
c c 



,cz_ < 
<sG * 



C 

c: 



<JC_ C' "C < 


«*C__ C! <; *c * 


««d cc < c -• 


«d c : c< «< 


^^^~^Jb"-— • "C_ ISia 


<C c ■■■■<_ * 










c: «OdZ C <r ^c 


ssKZ < * -<; 


««T t « <: 


-<Tc ^c 


- <s0gZ. j<S f •^ 


< «9CI_<': -ic ^1 


<<CJ< 


r c ^EL_ 




<SCL5- " ■ ■*&> 


<: «dls c <C 


^<CL'' c *C- 


rCZ\ C «C 


^<T3 * J^ 


r<3 c ^_ 


■<T7: c *«C; 


c <r<<:i<: 



<«c_ c c r <r 















«CLc c <: 

«C7_c c • 



dec <c. 



Cc; < 

o cc 



«LC'< ' 
«. << c 



< C 

,< - <3c; 



<c c 



i. c 
C € 

c c 

C € 



c 
c 



cv. 

C C 
C C 
C C 

c c 

c c 
<:: c 

c C 



_<v e <: < C <r- 

C< C< C c<- 
Cos c c?V 



CCc< 

< C 



<< c < c < « c 

Cc e c ci«L <- c 

C< C_._ C C C C V " 

<C t C. d< , r 

Cjc. •C C_ <: < c 

CC Cl C <r< 
< < C <T O c.. 
C< <r < < 



i- € C, 

e cc 

< V < CC 

- ex 

< £ '< >< <? 
cc - j ct 

< .- ■ ■ <i 



a c 

■ 



•c 


<L 


^•rc 


c 


c i" 


C 


o 


r 


C - 




-<; 




< < V 








<C 


c 


< < 


c 


* ' 


r 


c< 



Q g c Cc c <: 
Su- <<■ Cc c:; <: 

- c c cc c <r: 
' ^ cc c 

^_ c < eg ci <? 

C_. ' CC Cl 

d - c CC «. 
<j-c <sr •« 

•««:*. <lX< cc 

CTc cc 

«.*< ci cc 
«c cc 

C cc 

«fc«i C cc 

c <r 

c i <c <cr 
cl cc 

«*>£*£ cc 
* ; c «; ■ 

c - c cc 

<-•'. Cc CT^ 

cs c c <c~- : - 

ci c <t 4C * 
<1 CC cijv ■■• 
c c c <r~ 

<i . C <C ' 

c < <c 

<Ti c c <T1 1' 



C - J c 



cli < c 
c:. ■ c d 

<~ C C «C 

«cli c c •. .<^ - 
c <r~ 



^c: :«c.- 

c -C co 

c <^ «c 



<1 ^ 



<1_ cc < 

<<r_ c c 



Cl 



.-- <r d. 



->, c c: <r 

<c<c c: 



«1 c 


< 


d d 




1 tl <L 




^1 <T 


' ' 


«:i <r 




•5S4 "< 




<ii: c 




«ci c 




CC_ r 


- 


cc^ c 




«3£L~ " ci 




cc 


« 


<C <?. 


C7 < 


cC c 


<*/ . « 


cc <^ 


<x. . 9. 


«x c 


c-fc 


c 


c«r <.< 


<r C 


"5C C 


cc' 


CC 


<c *~ 


cc cc 


l cc . c 


C<L 



cac^c: 

CL<^ 



<i c <r 

CCc'C^ 

<r.ccC ^ c 
<Cl cC "■;-.«. 

Cicc c 
^: r cC 

CccCl '* 
<i^ ceil % ' ]<: ~ 

CcCC c ^- 
<rccr r 



c^c 
<iscr '■-■•■'' « 
Clc'Cl "-■■• • 
CLcCl t < 

circr «c ^ 

CiC^. 
CL > «CL 

:. : « c 
V^CL:-:- <r . c 



cc <C 
<x: CC 
cs c 
CC CC_ 

<.<£<; C«^ 

c<*x. • *«r 



«ri. c <i 

c:<cc: 

C(XC 



ciicc 

CCC 

■CtcC 
vC i - CC 

cccc 

<LaC . 

<:c c* 
c< <c 

C cCL. 

c< cC 

- <<-C 

cc d 
cc< C 

CCcC 
Cc cC 

cc -c: 



* 

<:« 

<1C<C 
«: C 

AC ■'• c<« 

«C < C 



B 







LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




DDDDaTDflSHD 







■kg 



Hhbbb nit* 



